In the 1970s, you could hardly open a magazine or pass abillboard without seeing the advertisement for Virginia Slimscigarettes that said, "You've come a long way, baby." It usuallyfeatured a flowing-haired, liberated modern woman alongside somedrudge of a generation or two earlier, pegging out laundry. Theimplication (as well as that smoking was good for you) was thatwomen had revolutionised their lives in unprecedented ways over afew decades, and that a great broad path of such freedoms still layahead, along with some fab new haircuts.

True, women's lives had changed rapidly and would continue to do
so. But how dated this ad now sounds, not least for its Whiggish
delight in human progress. This feels odd today, when prosperity
and security are falling away and many fear losing freedoms too. We
are drawn now more to circular than to progressive styles of
history. We don't relish triumphalist narratives so much as books
in which we see human beings spiralling on, repeating the same
patterns and never getting any wiser.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex, an enthralling history
of changing ideas about sexual freedom and desire from 1600 to
1800, interestingly blends progressivist and circular approaches.
He shows us a Western world (mainly England) emerging from medieval
sexual morality and enjoying 200 years of relative freedom, but he
also shows it sliding back into repression and denial in the 19th
century. The future remains a question mark.

The overall narrative is broad and bold. In medieval and early
modern Europe, Dabhoiwala writes, sexual behaviour was governed by
the community and by God. To say that sex was an individual's
private business would have sounded bizarre: although you didn't
make love in public, you didn't exactly do it in privacy
either.

Extramarital sex was punishable in public by whipping,
banishment or death; homosexuality and prostitution were
"filthiness", and no one expected free choice. Moreover, women were
largely blamed for sexual misconduct, as they were thought too weak
to control their lusts.

The Reformation opened things up by undercutting church
authority and turning some matters over to personal conscience. By
the mid-17th century, preacher Laurence Clarkson could argue that
adultery was no sin so long as it was practised in a pure spiritual
state, and Thomas Webbe, a "long-haired, music-loving antinomian"
of Wiltshire, lived communally with his third wife, his mistress,
and the mistress's husband. "There's no heaven but in women," he
reportedly said, "nor no hell save marriage."

These were hardly mainstream cases, but the religious pluralism
enshrined by England's 1689 Toleration Act brought broad sexual
pluralism too. In the 18th century a new being appeared: the
free-thinking sexual individualist. It seemed natural to say, as
Samuel Johnson put it, that "every man should regulate his actions
by his own conscience, without any regard to the opinions of the
rest of the world." And it was now men who were seen as having the
lion's share of sexual desire, to be managed by the individual
rather than by church or state. By 1750 most forms of consensual
extramarital sex had been legalised in Britain, with the notable
exception of homosexuality, but here too, persecution had lost its
deep moral justification.

When a William Brown was caught with another man's hand down his
breeches in 1726, he retorted, "I think there is no harm in making
what use I please of my own body." By the end of that century,
Britain had an astonishingly radical Free Love movement. Alas, just
around the corner lurked the Victorians, and that was the end of
that until the 20th century.

Today, our situation is troubling. We cannot be sure our
freedoms are unassailable, and parts of the world seem set in the
other direction. "If, reader, you happen to be a member of the
Iranian or Saudi Arabian moral police," Dabhoiwala remarks, you
will find medieval Europe's justifications for sexual discipline
very familiar. Societies that impose flogging, hanging or stoning
as penalties for sexual licence share key qualities: "the
theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of
religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, the belief
that men alone should govern." No one today could think such
societies are things of the past.

This forms the great sweep of Dabhoiwala's narrative, but it is
also filled with mystifying exceptions, ambiguous cases, reversals
of direction, and rebellious characters who do not quite fit into
their epochs. In such large-scale history, human complexity is
bound to intrude. It is to the author's credit that, usually, he
lets the exceptions speak.

The story ebbs and flows through its themes; the resulting tidal
quality is pleasing, and Dabhoiwala is eloquent about why it must
be written that way. Europe's 200-year journey through sexual
freedom was "largely a jumbled, unconscious process". It happened
in "a remarkably messy and inadvertent way". And, he says, "is that
not how most ideas spread, and how most of us in practice make
sense of the world around us?"

Yes, it is, and this thought makes his book inspiring as well as
provocative. "The past is littered with alternative paths not
taken," he warns; no single path lies ahead either. However far we
may have come, it is never fully clear where we are or how long we
will stay here. Let us just hope that we don't have to go all the
way back again.

Sarah Bakewell's latest book is 'How to Live: a life of
Montaigne in one question and 20 attempts at an answer'
(Vintage)